Gold Star
by idealistic.realism
Summary: A post-ep of sorts for "Noisy Edge". Amita's got a new thesis advisor, and Charlie gets to fulfill a promise to his father. One shot.


**Author's Note: **Well, I'm playing outside of my normal fandom, but I just couldn't help myself. I'm absolutely in love with this show. Really. If it were a person, I'd marry it. This takes place some indeterminate time after "Noisy Edge". I have two quotes, one from "Vector", one from "Sabatoge". And, of course, the whole note thing is from "Vector" as well. However, there are no spoilers in here. One other thing, while I have read this over, I haven't had it beta-read. One, I don't have a beta. Two, I wanted to get this up before "Manhunt" airs and possibly blows this story out of the water (having no real idea what's going to happen, I wanted to play it safe, not sorry). It's a little after 1:30 am here, so I'm hoping this reads well, and doesn't ramble, as I sometimes have a habit of doing. That said, this is a sort of warm up. I wanted to test the waters and see how I fared doing a Numb3rs fic before sitting down and outlining a little plot bunny that's been hopping around in my brain for a while. Enjoy! And let me know what you think!

PS, I like Charlie and Amita, and the idea of them together is cute. I'm glad, though, that TPTB have decided that Charlie is, in fact, responsible enough not to risk his career, and Amita's, despite Alan and Don. Of course, I also think that Amita just needs to get a club and whack Charlie over the head after that little chalkboard scene in "Noisy Edge". Hey, it worked for the cavemen! And really, "Not anymore"? What the hell kind of answer is that? Of course NTSB lady (sorry, can't remember her name right now) was interrupting something! Okay, I feel better now.

**Disclaimer: I do not own Numb3rs. I'm not quite sure who holds the actual rights, having no idea how Hollywood contracts work. But I'd wager a guess that the show's creators, Scott Free Entertainment, and CBS hold the biggest shares. I'm not doing this for profit, just for fun. I mean no harm nor offense. And I'm rather poor. Enjoy.**

**Gold Star**

Charlie's eyes passed over the equations on the paper one more time. He sighed, his eyes were seeing the numbers, and a portion of his brain was there, was focused, but the rest… On a good day, his brain would be off in a myriad different directions. Tonight, the feeling was multiplied by a hundred. No. A thousand? A quadrillion? And how sad was it that a genius mathematician couldn't even come up with the number?

Giving up all pretense of working, he was alone in the house, _his _house, anyway, Charlie closed the cover of the notebook and pushed it off to the side. He glanced around the room, unchanged from the last time he did so, and finally gave into temptation and looked at his watch. An hour. Sixty minutes. Thirty-six hundred seconds. Considering some of the numbers he worked with, that didn't sound all that long. Except that it was. An hour, a whole _hour_ seemed like an infinity when he'd been waiting two years.

He sighed again, and let's not even get into where _that_ thought could lead. Technically, an hour was an infinity. Split an hour in minutes, split minutes in to seconds, and so on. Like breaking down the distance between two points, two people, even. A meter, a decimeter, a centimeter, a millimeter. Small little leaps of infinity that he had been dwelling on over the past two years far too often for what he guessed was healthy. No matter how close he was, there was always that small infinity of distance between himself and…

He stood up abruptly, wincing as his pinched nerves dumped sensation back into his legs and feet. His father and Don had both told him there were better places to work than sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table. He never listened. He stretched his back, stretched his arms over his head, and glanced at his watch again. Fifty-six minutes. Three thousand three-hundred sixty seconds. _"We all have the same number of minutes at all times, do we not?"_ Larry's voice suddenly came back to him. He wondered if the minutes were ticking by just as slowly for her. Probably not. But then, she had seemed just as excited, as nervous, as himself. He smiled…well, maybe they were.

An hour later, well, fifty-six minutes later, there was a knock on Charlie's door. He couldn't help the wide grin that spread over his face as he rushed (maybe a little _too_ fast) to answer. Didn't care if the grin made him seem young and eager. Hell, he _was_ young…and eager.

"Amita," he greeted. He could feel himself smiling. Okay, maybe he did care if he seemed young and eager, but he couldn't really stop himself if he tried.

"Charlie," she answered with a smile of her own before dropping her eyes to the side. It was odd, she'd never really had any trouble meeting his gaze in the two years they'd worked together. But, that was when he was her advisor, when she was his student. Those rules didn't apply anymore, and Charlie was willing to wager that they would both need time to reach the level of comfort that those rules, even though they were hated, had afforded them. He opened the door wider.

"Come in. I was just going to grab my shoes and my coat, then we can go," he invited, guiding her with a hand on the small of her back to the sofa. A familiar touch and yet so different from before. Like he had often told Don, new factors could completely change the equation, even one that had been familiar. This new equation was electrifying for them both because he doubted she'd be shivering from the cold _inside_ his house. And, strangely enough, that little tell was the boost to his confidence that he needed. Charlie remembered that it wasn't just him who had been looking forward to tonight. He flashed her another smile as he ran upstairs for shoes and coat. No more wasted minutes. And, hopefully, no more infinitesimal infinities of distance to breach. And, good Lord, was he alliterating? He rolled his eyes at himself in the mirror above his dresser. "Get it together," he scolded himself, but he could see the twinkle in his own eyes and just thanked God that it matched the one he'd seen in hers when he opened the door.

When he came back downstairs, Amita was rifling through a backpack. She seemed to be taking inventory, so intently she didn't look up at his noisy decent of the stairs.

"Yeah, I - uh - I found that a while ago. I just kept, well, forgetting to bring it to you," Charlie clarified guiltily. She looked up hurriedly and stood.

"No, it's fine. I'd forgotten about it, actually," she replied, her hands worrying the zipper. The silence stretched out as they regarded each other. New factors, new equation. "So," she finally broke the silence, "it's quiet tonight. Where's your father?"

"Oh, um, his book club was hosting a, um, a dinner at - at Ray's house," Charlie explained. Now that he thought about it, the place was quiet. Even the bird was silent. "How's the new thesis advisor?" he asked, not wanting the let the silence linger into the awkward.

"Oh, Larry was right, Dr. Grayson is very nice. I think she and I will get along just fine. But, she's not you," Amita confessed quietly.

Charlie edged closer to her and took the backpack from where her hands were still nervously worrying the zipper. He dropped it on the floor. "No?"

"Of course not, there's only one of you, Charlie." She inched closer as well. A centimeter of distance.

"Mmm, I'm glad," his voice was just a whisper now. A millimeter of distance.

"Are you?" she teased a little, but her smile trembled.

"Mmm-hmm," against her lips. No more distance, no more seconds, no more waiting. Just this wonderful solution to this long, agonizing, but beautiful equation. _"Someone's going to snatch her up."_ Don's voice. Someone did, he thought, deepening the contact, equations flying through his mind. Probably, statistics, magnetic attraction. And simple math equations. Two years, one hundred four weeks, seven hundred thirty days, seventeen thousand five hundred twenty hours, one million fifty-one thousand two hundred minutes, sixty-three million seventy-two thousand seconds. And it was _so_ worth the wait. They pulled apart, gazed into each others eyes. Charlie could feel himself grinning again and bit his lower lip.

"Come on, let's go have some dinner," he said, nodding towards the door. "You can tell me more about how Dr. Grayson isn't like me." And he winked at her, making her laugh as he pulled her by the hand towards the entrance. He saw the backpack on the floor where he'd dropped it and left it there. He figured it gave him an excuse he didn't really need anymore to see her again.

He stopped just as he reached the door handle.

"Charlie?" she questioned.

He squeezed her hand, "Hold on a minute." A minute, sixty seconds. Not really that long of a wait compared to two years.

"What are you doing?"

"Actually…I just wanted to leave a note for my dad," he said, walking back over to his notebook and tearing out a page. He glanced over at her raised eyebrow as he scribbled out his quick message. "It's something I promised him I'd do," he finished, reading his words over before nodding to himself.

Amita walked back to him and glanced over his shoulder. She giggled a little as she read over his note. "I remember that night."

Charlie shrugged looking up at her, "So do I," he held her gaze for a moment before standing. "Just let me tape this to the fridge - "

"The refrigerator?"

"Yeah, I promised. I'm too old to tape up test grades anymore."

She laughed fully then, threw back her head a little, and he lost himself in the motion, in watching her hair moving with her. In the fluidity of it. In the equation of it. He shook himself mentally when she spoke again.

"Well, then, you shouldn't disappoint him."

He walked briskly to the kitchen, forgoing the tape and just sticking the note under a couple of magnets. He turned around and jumped a little at Amita's unexpected proximity. Her eyebrows were raised in amusement.

"Wha - " he started to ask, when she pulled something from behind her back. It was a sheet of gold star stickers. "_Where_ did you get those?" he asked.

"My backpack. I had gotten them a while ago. When I was tired of working on my thesis, I would sometimes go to the community center and volunteer as a math tutor for the kids there. I have gold and silver stars," she explained as she stuck a gold one on the top of the note.

"And how did I merit a gold star over a silver one?"

"Trust me, it was close. After two years, I was beginning to think you would never get it."

"Get what?"

"That I liked you."

He shook his head, becoming a little more serious, "Trust me, Amita, I knew. But I was your advisor. It wasn't just my career, it was yours too and I - "

She stopped his words with a hand over his mouth. "I know that, Charlie. I really do. That's why I waited."

He took her hand away and kissed it and her eyes brightened.

"Besides, I figure you've never gotten a silver star in your entire life. I'd hate to be the one to ruin that record now."

He chuckled, shaking his head, "Alright you, let's go."

Two hours later, Alan Eppes entered his house…his son's house. He shook his head, it would take a long time to get used to that. But, he was happy that Charlie had bought the place, even if it wasn't what he'd had in mind. The entire Eppes family was closer now than it had been in years, and the house was the foundation of it all. He couldn't quite imagine it working out that way if all three of them were in different parts of the city.

"Charlie, I'm home," he called out. No answer. Well. What could his youngest son be up to? Alan groaned, hoping he wasn't at CalSci lost in some equation. He was awed by his son's brain, but often worried that it excluded him from so much outside of math.

He dropped his keys on the entrance table and headed into the kitchen, flipping on the light. He'd put together a sandwich, knowing his youngest hadn't probably even thought of eating, and he'd bring it, and a long lecture, with him to his son's campus office. As he turned towards the fridge, a tiny metallic gleam caught his eye. Frowning, he wandered over to the note, picking it from it's magnetic confines and reading it. A grin slowly spread itself across his face. He'd skip the sandwich and the lecture. Maybe Charlie wasn't excluding himself from life after all. In fact, it seemed that his son was jumping in with both feet…_finally_. He put the note on the counter, a contented sigh escaping him, and shut off the lights. One son down, one to go.

_Dad,_

_You're right, love is more important than learning. I promised you a note on the fridge when I had a girlfriend. Amita and I are out at dinner. Don't wait up._

_-- Charlie_

Alan had to admit, the gold star was a nice touch. Amita and his son would go far, he just knew it.


End file.
